​I think much of the reason why Sitamani resonates so deeply is because it's a rare example of a place where humans have not yet imposed themselves completely on nature.
​  In most areas of the world, man rules supreme and nature is squashed into the margins, beaten back or forced into servitude. 
  But on Sitamani, there is still a balance. There are some buildings, planted trees, a few fences and other evidence of human existence, but the natural world is included with them rather than impeded by them. Wires become bird perches, walls become lizard sunning spots, outbuildings become nest sites and eves become bat roosts. Small buck graze on the fringes of the lawn, weaver birds attach baskets to tree branches, and social insects set up thriving residences in the corners of roof timbers. 
  Here, you are the guest of nature, not her overlord. And you are at her mercy too, when thunder and lightning dance jaggedly around you and torrential rain hammers down over your head. When dry Berg winds shake the walls and buffet you menacingly, the threat and scent of wildfire hot in the air. And when snow falls silently and drapes the world in a soft blank carpet, trapping you and everything else temporarily in place.

Sitamani was a unique place to grow up, privileged and wonderful in its own way. But it was also not without its downsides. As a teenager I craved social interaction with others my age, and since the nearest sizable town was an hour's drive away, this was difficult to satisfy. 
  I envied friends who could walk to each other's houses, and attend social gatherings where they could meet girls. Any such endeavours on my part involved complex planning for lifts and sleep-overs, any youthful spontaneity obliterated by unyielding dependence on pre-arranged pick-up and drop-off times - the complete antithesis of cool.
  This was also the dawning of the internet age - a portal to a fascinating new world opening tantalisingly from beneath our fingertips. But given Sitamani's remote location, on the bitter end of a long and unreliable copper cable, internet access was something I could only dream of. Simply sending or receiving an email through our shrieking 10kbps dial-up modem took half an hour. Accessing any kind of website was simply out of the question. 

So it was not surprising that, as I began to approach adulthood, I also began to lean away from my home on Sitamani. I wanted parties, loud music and connection; not nature, peace and solitude.
  It was almost inevitable therefore that I would find myself transposed to essentially the exact inverse of my childhood home: A crowded, noisy, concrete metropolis, on the opposite end of the earth, where I could soak up all the interaction, infatuation and experience I felt was deficient in my bones.
  And yet, even during those loud, hedonistic days, I still felt the pull of Sitamani. My anchor remained lodged in those soft hills, their essence sealed under my skin like a tattoo, irrespective of the number of nights I spent losing myself to pounding Trance music in smokey, laser-pierced nightclubs. 
  Throughout those early years in London, I carried a small photo album containing a handful of carefully selected pictures from home, which I would often stare at wistfully in the quiet moments before I fell asleep. At the time, I don't believe I consciously understood exactly what it was I was holding on to. I thought it was just regular homesickness - the product of finding oneself in a new culture, far from the familiarity of the life I'd known before. 
  But the photos themselves reveal the truth. Their subject matter is varied - my parents, my cat, our house, my car - but all of them are set within the wider context of Sitamani itself. The property is the backdrop to my entire life contained within that album. And when I flicked through it, I was yearning just as much for the background as for the subject matter.

Sitamani has a permanence in my psychology which is difficult to describe. Although we only moved there fully when I was 13, my parents had already owned the property since I was a preschooler. Essentially, as long as I can remember. 
  Initially it was just a simple patch of grassland, set about a kilometre north-east along the same ridgeline as my grandparents property Shamba Yetu, where we would often spend our holidays. 
  In the early days, we would drive across to the property to plant or water trees, like the avenue of pin oaks running up the driveway from the gate to the future house site. The young saplings were frail and isolated in the comparative vastness of the open land, tiny fluttering leaves on spindly stems, rendered almost invisible in grass almost as tall as they were. 
  But these were the first tentative steps towards a future life that my parents were adamant we would one day return to claim. And, with exceptional determination on their part, around 8 years later we had not only shifted our lives from Johannesburg to Boston, but also turned the empty grassland into a habitable home. 
  First, my dad dug a well (by hand, I might add) to provide water, and set up a system to pump it up into storage tanks on the hillside. Next, we assembled a little wooden hut in which we camped over weekends, while work then progressed with building the main house and outbuildings.

​We moved as soon as it was physically possible to live in the house, still far from complete at this point. There were no internal doors or ceilings, the walls still unpainted. During thunderstorms, the rain hammering on the exposed tin roof was often so deafening that we couldn't talk. 
  Initially, there was no plumbing either - just a single standpipe in the garden from which we filled plastic buckets, and an outdoor 'long-drop' privy, which we drolly nicknamed The Shateau. In the evenings we would drive over to my grandparents house where we would take it in turns to have a bath. 
  But rather than it being an inconvenience or a hardship, we considered it a privilege to finally be able to live on our own land, in our own house. For my parents particularly, it was the fulfilment of a dream conceived a decade earlier.
  My mum and dad's perseverent work continued, and presently we had flushing toilets, baths, tongue-and-groove ceilings and white painted walls. Plants began to fill out the garden, and the tiny trees, planted all those years earlier, began to flourish, punctuating the grassland with colour and texture. 
  A subtle, almost imperceptible shift was occuring. Without even realising, we had quietly progressed from squatting on the landscape to living within it, accepted by it just as much as we accepted it ourselves - a mutual agreement between our little family and the nature around us. Sitamani was no longer just 'the property', it was our home.

​Today, on the 25th April 2020, I have arrived at a particularly significant milestone. As of around 9:30am this morning, I’ve been a resident of the UK for a full eighteen years, meaning that I’ve now lived in England for longer than I ever lived in South Africa.
  To put it another, more mind-boggling way - if I’d fathered a child when I arrived in the UK, that child would now be the same age as I was when I landed here (not to mention there’d have been some rather alarming things going on in my personal life).

The fact that I’ve now spent more years in England than South Africa is a bizarre thought, and one that I couldn’t even have imagined when I stepped off that Virgin Atlantic flight in April 2002. Back then, it was all about living from moment to moment, sucking up the experiences around me like a recently unblocked plughole, overwhelming myself wilfully with the sights, sounds and experiences of a culture so similar, and yet so fundamentally alien to my own.
  I was most certainly a foreigner. A tourist even. I had a strong sense of being overseas, away from home. A sense that, as long and free-ranging as my chain was, the anchor to which it was attached still lay firmly in the serene folds of the Drakensberg mountains in South Africa.

Of course, today I’m still essentially that same person, albeit now with the clichéd paradigms of less hair and more wisdom (the two apparently being inversely proportional).
  But there’s one fundamental aspect of my personality which has come into question more as the years have rolled by, and that’s the matter of that anchor. These days, although the weight of it still remains wedged in place back in South Africa, the chain by which I’m attached to it has gradually been corroding away in the salty waters of my life experience, to the point now that if I tugged on it, I'm not sure it would still hold.
  If for some reason I were forced to choose between British or South African citizenship tomorrow, I think it would be a pretty easy decision to make.

The thing is, while superficially I still consider myself to be “South African” (mainly because my British life still hasn’t quite succeeded in removing the saffa tint from my voice), the reality is these days I bear only a passing resemblance to the residents of my birthplace. I am missing nearly two decades of popular culture, I have forgotten much of the language, rules and customs, and despite my best attempts to keep myself in the loop, I also know precious little about my country's current affairs or politics.
  Were I to pack up my belongings and move back there tomorrow, I would find it just as bewildering as I found the UK when I first arrived here. And doesn't that say a lot.

But, here's the rub - I don't really feel like I'm British either. Instead, it feels rather as though I've turned on the TV part-way through a movie - early enough for me to get to grips with the characters and figure out the storyline, but far enough along that I've missed a few important scenes at the beginning.
  No matter how involved I become with the plot, no matter how many tears I shed at the end when the protagonist's dog dies, I will still always be missing a few final pieces of the puzzle. Of course, I can still find out what happened at the beginning by asking someone who watched the whole thing, but even so, I will still always have that nagging feeling of having missed a bit.

And so, if I’m neither South African nor British, what precisely am I?
  Well, a hybrid, really. Britafrican. And in fact, that’s something I've become quite proud of over the years. After all, hybrids are almost always an improvement - they combine the best of two individual concepts into something new and unique which surpasses the originals. In the same way that the diverse gene inheritance of multiracial people means they are stronger and less susceptible to disease, my Saffa/Brit cultural inheritance gives me some advantages over my mono-national contemporaries.
  On one hand, I've retained many of my South African cultural mannerisms - my unique accent, my proficiency with a 'braai' (barbecue), my love and experience of outdoor activities like hiking or camping, and my useful local knowledge when talking about or showing people around my homeland. On the other hand, I have a British passport, a solid knowledge of UK history, geography and politics, and a bank account with some nice solid pounds sterling in it (well, relatively solid anyway - thanks, Brexit). I’m as proud of my Britishness as I am of my South-Africanishness, even though neither one defines me completely.

Being a hybrid also grants me a unique perspective on life in both countries. I’ve noticed, for instance, that many Brits have a tendency to bemoan the shortcomings of their country - the government, the transport, the weather and even their own culture. As an immigrant though I subconsciously compare every aspect of my British life to that in my country of origin. I’m not stewing over the five-minute delay on the tube so much as marvelling at the convenience of its very existence. I’m not grumbling about the continual dampness so much as celebrating our abundance of water.
  Likewise, when I’m in South Africa I can now appreciate the raw, visceral beauty of the country, its culture and its people, just as a tourist would, without becoming bogged down by its day-to-day fears and frustrations.

So, after eighteen years in England, I'm in the arguably enviable position of being able to consciously pick-and-mix the best bits from both of my homelands with which to furnish my personality, like a sort of cultural Ikea. It’s a rare gift, and one which can only really be obtained with the perspective gained from experiencing life for an extended period in more than one country.
  Sure, these days anyone with a passport and a credit card can travel to far-off lands and experience foreign culture. But it’s only once you immerse yourself in that culture for long enough to assimilate some of it into your own personality that you really become permanently richer for the experience.

Afrikaans people in South Africa have a word for a white colonial of British descent: "Soutpiel" (pronounced “sowt-peel”), which roughly translates as "Salty Penis". The rather droll joke being that they have one foot in Africa and one foot back in England, leaving their privates dangling in the sea between the two.
  It’s intended to be demeaning - the inference being that us “Souties” can never truly be South African because we can’t let go of our European roots. And certainly, I would concur that am the definitive (if not literal) personification of a Soutpiel.
  Nevertheless, as far as I’m concerned, the joke is on them. Sure, I may have roots in Europe, but I also have roots in Africa, and from them both I extract a rich cultural nourishment which includes both the dry red soil of the African plains and the damp white chalk of the British downs. And that can only serve to make me stronger and more culturally diverse, after all.
​

When I first stepped out onto English soil 12 years ago, I was completely oblivious to the complex class spiderweb into which I was walking. Of course, we had a class structure in South Africa, but as you’ve probably guessed, this was designated mainly by race. As terribly politically incorrect as this was, it did make things easy, especially in my young, naive child’s mind. Black people dug up the roads and vacuumed the house, white people worked in offices and drove BMWs. Simple. We were white, so we socialised with other whites. Some earned a bit more, some a bit less, but we were all essentially the same: White middle class. My parents were thankfully quite liberal, but I knew plenty of other white families who were openly derogatory about other races and their cultures. Such was the twisted world of apartheid South Africa. Things did start changing somewhat after Mandela came to power in 1994, but for the most part the social structure in the rural farming community where we lived remained largely unchanged. Blacks and whites lived totally separate lives, we in our comfy carpeted four-bedroomed houses and they in their primitive huts with straw roofs and open fires.

So it was naturally quite perplexing for me to settle in a country where the class structure is not nearly as obvious. On my very first day, shortly after disembarking the plane, I walked past a building site and was somewhat surprised to see a white guy shovelling dirt out of a hole. A couple of days later I watched intrigued as a team of white binmen collected the rubbish on my street. At first, I assumed this meant that everyone was the same, that class here simply didn’t exist. But of course that was very naive of me. I quickly learned that people here do indeed fit into one of three distinct classes – working class, middle class or upper class.

But this is where things get awfully complicated. Ask a builder what class he is, and he will probably tell you proudly that he is working class. “Salt of the earth, mate.” Cool. Easy. So all builders are working class then? Erm, not necessarily. Take Darren: He grew up in a working class family and started off working on building sites. But he now owns his own loft conversion company and employs teams of builders all round the country. He works in a plush air-conditioned office and drives a sleek new Jaguar. He will tell you he is middle class, pointing to his collared shirt and his prim secretary, but technically he is still a builder by trade.

Right, so it’s about money then? Well, that comes into it perhaps, but again, assume at your peril. I once dated a girl whose dad had the top job at a factory. They lived a very comfortable life in a stylish house with all the mod cons which I would have associated with middle class life back in South Africa. However, when I put this to her she seemed quite offended: “We’ve always been working class, we’re not posh!”

Hmmm.

The deeper you dig, the more convoluted it becomes. Where you live, what you eat, what you wear, what you watch on TV and what sports you like can all contribute to what class you fall under. Most middle class kids to go to university, many working class kids don’t. Middle class men are happy to use an umbrella when it rains, but take one to a building site and you’ll be laughed at. Working class people consider themselves as simple, honest, hardworking people holding the country together, and are liable to label Brits in the other social classes as “posh wankers” who haven’t got the guts for a “real man’s job” (say “mayn’s”). Middle and upper class people, by contrast, will often opine that the working classes are “a bit rough”, and consider them prone to violence, crime and, *cough*, unsavoury sexual activities. There are a few grains of truth in both perhaps, but as with any stereotype these opinions are vastly overinflated. When you dissolve away all the extraneous assumptions, the bare metal of the matter is simply that class isn’t really about your job or your bank balance; it’s about your culture.

Funnily enough, Brits don’t have any trouble assigning themselves and others into social classes. Most of them know instinctively where someone fits, even without speaking to them. And these days I generally do too. But explaining it is a struggle. It’s lots of little snatches of information, like how you conduct yourself, your accent, what vocabulary and grammar you use, what culture is important to you, what your parents do, where you hang out and what part of town you live in. But at the same time there’s no rule book which states that if you listen to classical music you are middle class and if you live on a council estate you aren’t. It’s more instinctive than factual.

All this leaves me in an odd position. What class am I? Do I import my old class assignment from South Africa to the UK, or is my class here determined by what I do for a living? The latter would certainly seem to apply to the lady I saw recently on a BBC documentary about London Underground. She is a cleaner, which most Brits would unanimously proclaim as a working class profession, yet in her home country of Russia she was a successful professional cyclist, basically a celebrity. So if this is the case, then based on the jobs I’ve had since I’ve been here, I am both middle class and working class. I have worked in a mortgage consultancy, an electrical installation company, at Tesco as a delivery driver and as a manager in a corporate office. In each profession I have had to mould myself to the predominant class structure in order to get on with my colleagues. A couple of years ago when I worked on building sites, the mere mention of art, rugby or university would generally be met with scornful remarks, so instead we talked about football and women with big breasts. At one stage we were working on an electrical installation job at the British Museum. As we were carrying a length of trunking through a display on ancient Mesopotamia, one of my colleagues remarked: “What kind of nobhead comes here and spends all day looking at these bits of old rock anyway?”

Indeed.

So during that period of time, I probably would have considered myself working class, based on my profession. But I would then find myself strolling home at night listening to Mozart or Beethoven on my iPhone, and accompanying my girlfriend at weekends on trips to art galleries and old castles. My colleagues, by comparison, wiled away their evenings watching Eastenders and spent their weekends playing football. I’m not in any way trying to insinuate that one pastime is superior to any other; only that they are very different. In which case, can I really class myself culturally with a group of people who have mostly alternate interests to my own? I don’t think I can.

So, I’m middle class then? Well, I don’t know. I live in Streatham, definitely not one of London’s most salubrious areas. I don’t own my own home, instead I rent a room in a flat shared with a couple of friends. My salary is not great – I don’t even earn enough to afford a car anymore. On paper I actually tick more working class boxes than middle class ones, and yet I feel more middle class than I do working class.

The conclusion I have come to is that as a foreign immigrant, I am in the seemingly enviable position of not being categorised into any social class, as opposed to having it pre-formatted into me by generations of social stereotyping. As a result, I have British friends who come from both working and middle class backgrounds, and I enjoy all of their company equally. But the downside is that, like a jigsaw piece from the wrong puzzle, I may perhaps be able to squeeze myself into a social space with similar gaps and protrusions, but I will never quite fit completely. And as long as that’s the case, I will never truly feel that sense of belonging that comes with the pride of belonging to your own class.